skonen_blades

A profound thing happened today.
Sonja and Audrey and I had lunch at Save On Meats and decided to walk back home.
The route took us along Hastings past Main.
About a block before Main, walking through the worst of it, someone started bellowing out "KID ON THE BLOCK! KID ON THE BLOCK!" and the shout was taken up down the strip, tent to tent.
Just a few people yelling it out like town criers.
I didn't stare or jump.
Just kept walking.
I didn't even realize it was in regard to Audrey until the second shout.
Anyone fixing that was still compos mentis put their rigs away or at least turned away from the sidewalk.
A few people even watched their language.
A block later passing more tents, I heard it said by a woman in the midst of a cluster of women in a doorway.
I didn’t look to see what was happening or if anything was happening.
I was profoundly moved.
That they'd still look out for a kid.
That they're still present enough to do that.
That they're still humans.
That they still see something as holy.


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I don’t live in a house. I live in a goose farm. My hands are crocodiles. One is the father and one is the song. The funniest thing to do in our house is pretend to fall over. I give unicorn rides. There are moons in the ceiling instead of lights and our cat is a he no matter how times we say that it’s a she. All of the pumpkins in the neighborhood belong to us. The bathtub is sad. The Christmas tree is great but it blocks the bookshelf with all the stories. The towel goes on the couch and no food competes with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich except for maybe the recently-discovered joy of Halloween candy.

I am a tire and this life is a wormhole. My ambition makes a sound like a squirrel before leaping up into the trees. I am sideways in a waterslide. The seasons are airplanes.



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It’s you. A star down in the darkness of me.

Half of the dna that created you seems to have left a hole in me that is letting light in.

The underground warps. I mean the cave where all our souls dwell. Mine changes. It’s like the shift of a glacier, a radiating and deep crack that finds its way all the way up to the light and down to the ocean floor of me. It’s not lightning. It’s love. A strange presence down there. Flashes of it were glimpsed up until now, like the fleeting dart of a deep sea angler’s antenna, or a shooting star dying across a smear of atmosphere.

But now it appears to have taken up residence. To say that, give or take, the last two years of my life have been the happiest, is a strange thing to roll around in the mind and on the tongue. To see it spread across the page like paint dropped in water is alienating. Worthy of further inspection. Like a hardy lichen that doesn’t need much to live has started a permanent station down there and it glows. I watch it like I'm in a airplane flying over a small town.

My heart is the bottom of a skateboard park. There is vibrant graffiti there now that the skaters are not erasing. It is your smile, your tiny ears, and our hands. It is your complete, almost zen commitment to your hugs. You don’t just hug me. You become a hug.

You are my daughter. You are capricious and unknowable, caught between a mastery of living in the now and a recklessness I admire. You exist in moods that pass like the changing of numbers on a clock. You force me to play at least once a day. To communicate with you, I need to come up to your level and I love visiting.

But it’s like I’ve taken a small chunk of your sun back to dimly candle my insides. Time away from you is time made dull. If I was a knife, I feel as if I have been sharpened to a thinness that is almost done. I am ready for the rest of my life.

I’ll be the anchor. You be the kite. I will always love you.




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My daughter the combo breaker.

I’ll meet you on Gilligan’s LOST Fantasy Island. Together we’ll plot escapes and experience fulfilled wishes.

Death is a lullaby taken to extremes but you’re the forgotten screwdriver in the engine casing. The phantom pain of forgotten ideas making my mind itch.

I hope that one day sexism is like my great-grandparent’s racism. Quaint, embarrassing, and a sign of a bygone era.

A lot of poor countries can’t afford the luxury of female non-combatants. I’m glad you won’t be forced into the army here but it could teach what I probably couldn’t. Hand-to-hand combat, for instance.

The Canadian women that made the bombers for England in WW2 used to deliver the machines by flying them over solo from Canada to the UK. Those bombers usually required a crew of six. Women weren’t allowed to fight.

I want to raise a critical thinker. Your eyes already bring December as strongly as they bring July. Your withering, penetrating stare should be used to back up thoughtful points while your laugh should be used to clear off chess tables with the sweep of an eyelash.

You’ll make recipes, you’ll paint, you’ll draw. You’ll dance with us and sing with us.

I know you’ll be a silly goose because you already are one. I think all three of us are going to laugh a lot.

But you’ll always know there’s nothing you can’t do.



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I believe that a giant meteor will hit the Earth and kill us. Maybe not soon, maybe not for millennia, but we’ll all die. As a race. Everything we’ve done will be gone.

The universe will continue until it, too, will gutter like a match, heat leeching out of it until only gravity is left and it collapses in on itself with such force that it restarts.

I believe the exact same set of circumstances will start all over again and that will result in the same Earth being created and the same life populating it.

I think that those people will be able to dimly remember what happened in the last iteration of the universe. I believe this happens over and over again.

When you get a sense that maybe you should just stay in tonight, that’s your memory talking. When you meet someone and it feels like you already know them or when you get déjà vu or when you feel a pervasive feeling of wrongness, that’s your memory talking.

The event that kills us happens at the same moment in every version of the universe. No matter what we achieve or how much we accomplish, we haven’t yet been able to see our death coming or stop it.

In that very large way, we live in a consequence-free environment. No matter what happens here, it all ends at the same time for our race.

I think it’s important to try to do something different with your life. Do something you didn’t do last time.

That’s what my daughter is.

I am positive that she is new. In all my times before in this repeating universe, I never had a child.

I’m thrilled she’s here and I look forward to seeing how she progresses.




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